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School launches a new e-portfolio service

Tuesday, 19 December 2017

The National School has launched a new e-portfolio service – using the e-portfolio product OneFile – which has been rolled out to early-adopting groups of trainees across the HSST, STP and PTP programmes. New 2017 starters on the HSST programme, new STP trainees in Clinical Bioinformatics and Histocompatibility and Immunogenetics, and a pilot group of PTP Medical Physics trainees with the University of Cumbria, are already using the new service. OneFile will be rolled out to all pre-2017 HSST trainees in January 2018 and all STP trainees will be using OneFile by autumn 2018.

In making decisions about the new service, the National School have been led by research into the needs of users of the e-portfolio service – trainees, Training Officers and assessors. A comprehensive programme of user research in 2016, which captured feedback from over 600 trainees and Training Officers, provided the School with an intimate understanding of what users of the new service need most.

This work identified that the new service should seek to provide trainees with:

Better, more accurate progression reporting

Better, smarter notifications

Better support for feedback discussions between assessors and trainees

A place to store and manage evidence prior to its collation and submission for assessment.

OneFile was chosen because of its ability to meet needs in each of these priority areas.

The School's commitment to being led by the needs of trainees and Training Officers has continued through 2017 as OneFile was selected, configured and launched. For example, trainees and Training Officers were involved in the evaluation of a shortlist of likely candidate products. Trainees were directly involved in the selection of OneFile at the procurement stage and trainees were involved in an early evaluation of the School's proposed configuration of OneFile before it was launched to 2017 HSST trainees.

Furthermore, this commitment to being led by user research will continue through 2018 as the new service is rolled out to larger groups of trainees. A programme of research into the experience of HSST trainees using OneFile has begun and is already providing the School with useful insights. A parallel programme of activity will take place with STP trainees through 2018 so that the School can ensure that the service can be adapted and improved to meet user needs on an ongoing basis.

Stuart Sutherland, Head of the Digital Team at the School said: "We're already very pleased with how OneFile is beginning to be used in its groups of early adopters. We chose OneFile to be our e-portfolio service because it was the best-placed product in the marketplace to meet trainees' and Training Officers' needs. We intend to put in considerable effort to ensure that we understand what the experience of using the new service is like for its users and to seek to improve that experience as much as we can."